“Play It Loud” By Brad Tolinski and Alan di PernaDoubleday (379 pages, $26.95) The scream of the electric guitar was the dominant soundtrack of the 20th century.First developed to provide louder rhythm backup for big bands of the Swing Era, the electric guitar then killed the big bands, feasted on their corpses and looked for its next victim.Like Brando slouching against a jukebox in “The Wild One” -- a movie that came out just as the electric guitar was taking over the music world -- it’s an in

“Notwithstanding”By Louis de BernieresVintage (372 pages, $16)“Notwithstanding,” the new collection of 22 short stories from Louis de Bernieres, is utterly charming. And, no, that’s not damning with faint praise.Charming is a quaint, old-fashioned word, and this is a quaint book, originally released in England in 2009, that captures the quirky characters in an old-fashioned English village, called, of course, “Notwithstanding.”But while the stories in this collection are sweet, there’s no treacl

“Alfred Hitchcock: A Brief Life” By Peter AckroydDoubleday (276 pages, $26.95)There are days when an 800-page biography of some fascinating person is just what we want to dive into. And then, there are days when we feel less ambitious; when we want to immerse ourselves in someone’s life, but can't quite summon the intestinal fortitude to crack the spine of a doorstop. Behold that very useful literary form: the short biography.The celebrated British biographer Peter Ackroyd has written a handful

“Mister Monkey” By Francine ProseHarper (285 pages, $26.99) Francine Prose’s “Mister Monkey,” a novel about a very bad musical, leaves you with the feeling you have after watching a really good musical: exhilarated, lightened, maybe even humming. Its characters dance around each other, tangoing and twirling, voices chiming out in solo after solo -- until it all comes together in a moment of perfect harmony. You read it with the uncanny feeling that you aren’t alone; that there’s an audience read

“The Boat Rocker” By Ha JinPantheon (240 pages, $25.95)“You’re like a little turtle attempting to rock a boat shared by two huge countries.”Hence the title of Ha Jin’s “The Boat Rocker,” in which the so-called turtle is 36-year-old Feng Danlin, a journalist working on Long Island for a small Chinese news agency that’s trying to speak truth to power back home in Beijing.Easier said than done, which is why Feng is being lectured by a Chinese consul, making clear that if Feng continues rocking the

“Enough Said” By Mark ThompsonSt. Martin’s (342 pages, $27.99)“Worst. President. Ever” By Robert StraussLyons (257 pages, $26.95)The United States of America is a place made of words.In the European imagination, the New World presented a blank slate upon which to write. (Indigenous peoples saw, and see, things differently, of course.) Without a common language, history, culture or racial identity, Americans had to create a new nation rhetorically as much as politically. From the Declaration of I

"Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother’s Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South” By Beth MacyLittle, Brown and Company (432 pages, $28) Beth Macy started hearing the stories back in 1989 -- as soon as she moved to Virginia to write feature stories for the Roanoke Times. Stories about the two black albino brothers kidnapped from the tobacco fields and sold into the circus. Warnings from parents issued as they dropped the kids off at the fair.“You stick together, or you might get s

“The Nine of Us”By Jean Kennedy SmithHarper (272 pages, $29.99)Jean Kennedy Smith takes comfort in memory in her new book, “The Nine of Us: Growing Up Kennedy.” Now 88, the last of her parents’ children alive, the former ambassador to Ireland is entitled to tell the story of her storied family any way she likes. After all, she was there.One might wish that she was, well, a little more “there” -- or, perhaps, more revealing -- but such is the difference between “memoir” and “history.”Smith doesn’

“Capone” By Deirdre BairNan A. Talese/Doubleday (395 pages, $30)Go into any souvenir store on a touristy Chicago street and behold the man: Al Capone. His visage will adorn T-shirts, refrigerator magnets, coffee cups and countless tacky tchotchkes people buy to commemorate their visit to the city where the world’s most famous gangster made his name. Even worse: Go into enough Chicago-area restaurants or bars, and it may surprise you how many are decorated with framed pictures of the ruthless kil

TOKYO (AP) - Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami warned against excluding outsiders and rewriting history as he accepted the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.Murakami spoke Sunday in Odense, Denmark, the birthplace of Andersen, the 19th-century fairy-tale writer. His speech, titled “The Meaning of Shadows,” cited Andersen’s dark fantasy “The Shadow,” a story about a scholar who loses his shadow but is eventually taken over by it and killed.“No matter how high a wall we build to keep intrud

“The Mothers” By Brit BennettRiverhead (278 pages, $26)The Mothers of Upper Room Chapel are worried about the future: “Anyone knows a church is only as good as its women, and when we all passed on to glory, who would hold this church up?” they demand, gazing with disapproval at the teenagers in their small Southern California congregation. Who will carry on? Not the “sullen and slow” boys, not the girls, who are “even worse.”How can any community survive with such a disappointing legacy?“The Mot

“Scream: A Memoir of Glamour and Dysfunction” By Tama JanowitzDey Street Books (304 pages, $25.99)When author Tama Janowitz was 15 years old, her pothead father suggested she enter a wet T-shirt contest if she couldn’t find a summer job. As one of New York City’s “It-Girl” writers in the 1980s, she rubbed elbows with the likes of Andy Warhol and the who’s who of magazine editors by day, and retreated to a meat locker-turned-apartment at night. Later, she traded city life for upstate New York, wh

“Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man who Wrote ‘Dracula’” By David J. SkalLiveright (652 pages, $35)Several years ago, I read the book “Dracula” for the first time, expecting that Bram Stoker’s 19th century fable of blood, lust and the undead would be a quaint echo of Dracula’s many screen incarnations. I was astonished at its powerful sense of creeping, unstoppable horror, still spellbinding more than 100 years after its publication.In “Something in the Blood: Bram